1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to an apparatus and method for estimating the recovery time for data assets.
2. Background of the Invention
Within many enterprises, data assets may be comprised of different types of data depending upon how the data assets are used and the importance of the data assets to the enterprises. Some examples of data assets are applications, databases, servers, files, file systems, and the like. Similarly, there are many tools for managing these data assets and the data on these data assets. For instance, one known enterprise data protection product provides many different data protection techniques to protect data assets within an enterprise, corporation, remote office, or the like. Some of these data protection techniques are: progressive incremental backup, image backup, snapshot (orchestration and management), and continuous data protection. However, other known data protection management solutions do not provide a mechanism to plan for and orchestrate recovery operations based upon recovery objectives for an organization. Another data asset management tool is a storage resource management (SRM) product. The SRM product helps to monitor and manage storage resources within an enterprise including capacity planning and reporting, provisioning, replication management, and such.
However, the combination of data protection products and data asset management tools do not offer a holistic or integrated view with the focus on:                1. Protecting enterprise data assets; and        2. Ensuring that recovery operations for enterprise data assets meet a required recovery time objective (RTO) or recovery point objective (RPO).        
That is, known data protection and storage resource monitoring systems are missing an integrated approach that offers analysis and assessment of “recovery readiness” for data assets. This existing deficit within the storage protection and management tools significantly increases the complexity of protecting and managing data. More importantly, known data protection and storage resource monitoring systems leave the determination about the readiness and efficacy of recovery to a manual process if readiness and efficacy of recovery are being considered at all.